


41 Nights and a Day

by rhye



Series: 41 Nights [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 14:13:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18740686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhye/pseuds/rhye
Summary: Jaime and Brienne together in Winterfell, during a brief interlude of happiness before the world comes crashing back in.





	41 Nights and a Day

**Author's Note:**

> After the Long Night, it takes time to mobilize armies and navies, more time to sail down the White Knife, and then to regroup and send a raven to Winterfell. We never hear of big ships going up the White Knife, implying the White Knife may not fit the Iron Fleet's boats. So perhaps the army has to march farther towards the coast. And then they are attacked in White Harbor. They may get a raven to Winterfell quickly from there, but, birds, eh?
> 
> So I decided it was forty one days from Brienne and Jaime's first day to their last together. This was chosen in deference to John the Baptist and Jesus, both spending forty days in the Wilderness. It's not a Wilderness, but Jaime and Brienne have effectively locked themselves away from the wider world, and that can never work. And the last day, when they leave the wilderness, doesn't count.
> 
> This is dedicated to all of you Jaime/Brienne shippers. You keep me afloat. May this buoy you. I hope it helps. It's meant to help. It helps me.
> 
> I do think Jaime feels like shit when Brienne assumes he is going back to help Cersei. He never said that, but it's her first conclusion. Yet honestly, it's his fault. He has let her live with just enough doubt to choke herself with.
> 
> This is the literally most words I've ever written in one day.
> 
> Entirely Brienne's POV.

41 Nights and a Day

1.

It’s fast and sudden (Perhaps not so sudden-- didn’t Brienne look back, watch him leave the Great Hall after her? Didn’t she know? Maybe she had always known it would end this way. Or is this a beginning?). She doesn’t have time for regrets, and she thinks, she _knows_ she loves him. So what if he’s just looking for a place to put his cock. She wants him.

Even as she thinks it, she knows it’s ungracious. She knows he’s been faithful to Cersei. She knows she is a first for him as he is for her. She knows he could fuck any of a hundred girls, Northerners though they be, with a body like his.

She knows this is a beginning. She is scared of getting her hopes up, though.

2.

The second night is different. Jaime goes slower, pausing to look into her eyes, to kiss her. He brings her to completion with his fingers, and finally with his manhood, spilling on her belly as he had the night before.

3.

She holds his hand and whispers. “You can spill in me. I’m not afraid.”

“I won’t dishonor you. You deserve better.” His voice is deep and trembling.

“I know what I deserve,” she says, “and I know what I _want_. My father needs an heir, and I am unlike to marry.”

“Who will you say the father his?”

For a moment, she does not understand his question. Then suddenly, with a wave of fury, she does understand. She is not Cersei. It never occurred to her to lie.

“Ser Jaime Lannister. I will tell the child and the kingdom that Ser Jaime Lannister, of Casterly Rock and of the Kingsguard, father to kings and savior of King’s Landing, put a child in me because I asked him to. I am not ashamed.”

Her answer seems to stall him, his breath hitching. She is wondering if it’s not her honor he is thinking of, but his own. But when he comes, he spills into her with an anguished cry that sounds like a sob.

4.

The next night, there is no fucking, no sex, no lovemaking. His eyes are clouded. He and Tyrion returned from the inn in Wintertown, Tyrion with a bloody nose, and she wondered if they’d fought each other. She doesn’t ask.

He has a bath brought up. They take turns bathing in silence before collapsing into bed. Jaime is asleep almost instantly. It’s then that she notices he put his hand back on after the bath, for sleeping. He has had it on every time they’ve been intimate. She reaches across him and unstraps it. She sets it gently on the table and curls back into the furs, pulling his handless arm across her waist.

5.

This time, she won’t allow him to wear the hand to bed with her. He japes about that to ease the tension, but his eyes tell a different story. Every so often he looks at her like he’s just discovered her existence, and it’s unnerving, but it chases away the shadow of her doubts. That night, she presses his empty wrist against her mouth, a chaste kiss. She then guides it to her lower lips-- a kiss that is anything but chaste. He spills on the blankets like a youth and apologizes, embarrassed.

She does not laugh at him, though. She is starting to see what Cersei has taken from him, and it’s far more than a hand.

6.

When the bath comes the following night, he lets her get in first. Last time they bathed, he waited until she was done before taking his turn. This time he rubs her shoulder and asks her to move aside. He slips in next to her. The tub is meant for one, and neither of them are small. When they use their hands to make each other come, the water splashes everywhere on the floor, spitting into the fire. Jaime sighs and slips into half-consciousness against her body. Her arms tighten around him. “Jaime,” she whispers, and kisses him on the forehead.

7.

He asks her to trim his beard. She has him sit before the fire. While she works, he whispers, “I’ve never done this before.”

“I noticed you are not prone to wearing beards in the South. Is it the heat, or…” Is it Cersei’s preference, she wants to ask. She hasn’t kissed anyone else, and doesn’t have a preference, but by his own admission, he’s been sleeping with his sister since before he could grow a beard.

He smiles. “I wasn’t talking about the beard.”

“What do you mean, then, ser?”

“This is a sennight. This is the first time I have slept next to the same woman for an entire sennight.”

“You jest, ser. Your sister--”

“Doesn’t often come to bed, and when she does, she’s as like to kick me out as not. The hand disgusts her.”

Brienne pauses. She feels something like anger building in her chest, but it unexpectedly turns to lust when she imagines the end of his handless arm. She’s rubbed it against her womanhood more than once in… has it only been a sennight? It’s a part of his body that’s reserved entirely for her, more so than even his cock. “How unfortunate for her. I find it rather useful.”

He laughs, and they don’t make it to the bed this time.

8.

She develops a preference for his beard quite suddenly when she discovers the delightful burning of it on her inner thighs when he takes her with his mouth.

9.

The armies had left at dawn, and the absence of the Dragon Queen seems to lift Jaime’s spirits far higher than she has seen them since the feast. That night, he tackles her to the bed, his arms wrapping around her waist, and throws her over. “I told you I was strong enough,” he japes as he climbs above her. She twists her legs around him and heaves, and soon she is sitting astride him. She wants to jape as well, but she doesn’t have his clever tongue. She moves her hips across him and he is rendered speechless as he tears at her clothes one-handed. This is a ferocity she doesn’t often see, but she likes it. It almost makes her think he’s as madly lusting after her as she is him. It almost makes her feel like he may love her, as she does him.

10.

He tickles her, driving laughter from her, and they wrestle again. She hears herself laughing and hates it. “Braying like a donkey,” one of the men in Renly’s camp had said. It had not been the first time she’d been called a donkey. One of her father’s bannermen, when asked if his son was free to marry her, had answered, “She’s naught but a donkey. Stubborn and mule-teethed and I hear tell she brays at the dawn.”

Jaime is smiling at her fondly, though. “I like it when you laugh,” he whispers.

She almost believes him.

11.

Usually their affection is confined to their room. It is an unspoken rule. She prefers not to provoke Lady Sansa, though Sansa is not ignorant of why Jaime has stayed behind. She prefers to keep Brienne the Knight and Brienne the Woman separate. She doesn’t want Pod to see her that way.

“What way?” Jaime asks when she voices this concern.

“As a woman, not a knight.”

He watches her for a moment, then says, “I assure you, Ser Brienne, Pod is very much aware that you are a woman. But why should one preclude the other? I will admit, I thought so too before I met you, but men are both knights and men every day. You do not have to play at being a man in order to be a knight. Certainly not for Podrick. He adores you, you know.”

She looks away, uncomfortable with the conversation. She loves Podrick as perhaps a woman does a son. Jaime gave him to her. She makes sure he spills in her that night, eager for him to give her another.

12.

This night, she sits very close to Jaime in the quiet Great Hall. There are few left in Winterfell with the armies gone. Lady Arya and Clegane left before the army even, and though it troubles her, she can tell it troubles Jaime more. The only obvious conclusion is that Arya is going for Cersei’s life, and the Hound no doubt went to kill the Mountain. She knows he loves his sister. She barely remembers having sisters, but she loves them still. It’s only natural, she tells herself.

Her thoughts are interrupted when Jaime captures her hand and begins dropping kisses on her knuckles. She goes to shake him away-- they’re in front of _everyone_ , in front of Lady Sansa and Podrick. As soon as her arm tenses, he whispers, “Don’t. Please don’t. You said you were not ashamed.”

She had said that. She lets him continue to kiss her hand. She catches Podrick’s eye and he flushes and looks away.

That night they walk hand in hand back to her chambers.

13.

“Would you rather I not wear it?” he asks her as she unstraps his hand.

She kisses the place where he lost his hand for her.

“No,” she says throatily, embarrassed. “Keep wearing it.” She runs her lips across the scar tissue. “This is only for me.”

He looks then as if he might say something, but whatever it was dies in his throat.

14\. 

They’d found the body of a babe in the crypts. Somehow they had missed it until it began to smell. Lady Sansa, holding back tears, asked Brienne to bury her.

That night, they do not have sex. Brienne feels hollow as she is reminded of everyone they lost only a fortnight ago. She sees the babe’s decomposing body when she closes her eyes, and wonders if it will ever leave her. They lay in dark in the bed a long time when she feels Jaime shift so that he can use his hand to soothe her hair. He strokes her in a slow, steady rhythm. Soon, she cannot help the tears that she is biting back. He holds her to his chest as she whimpers. It is the first time she has let him see her cry. It will not be the last.

15.

Jaime kisses her all over, from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet. He makes her come with his mouth. And then he spills inside her. That night, she dreams of a living babe.

16.

When he first whispers that she is beautiful, she opens her mouth to object on principle. But she remembers last night, and all the nights before, and her objection dies in her throat. She doesn’t fully trust this, not yet, but she thinks she might soon. She will if he keeps going on like this.

That night, he talks ceaselessly, his words crass and poetic at the same time. “Your legs are breathtaking. I can barely tear my eyes off them long enough to focus on your cunt. These are legs men would kill to die between.” When he does tear his eyes away, moving to focus on her center, he licks her and sighs. His eyes are soft and tender and on her eyes when he says, “Your juices taste of honey.”

Her breath is stolen from her by it. She knows he means it when he looks into her eyes and says it like that. He smiles, satisfied at the reaction he’s gotten, and drops his head back down to finish her. She screams his name when he does.

17.  
Brienne is overseeing the reconstruction of the inner bailey when she feels hands wrap around her shoulders. She almost throws the attacker off, but when one of her hands meet cold metal filigree, she instead hisses her irritation, “I’m working here”

“It’s almost dinnertime and I’m _bored_ ,” he whines against her ear. “The men know what they’re doing.”

Some of the men were giving her sidelong glances, others outright staring, as the Kingslayer-- the Lion of Lannister-- hung like a child off her shoulders.

“I swear to all seven gods--”

“It wasn’t any of the seven you were swearing to last night.”

She flicks a glance back to the men, but none seem to be able to hear his lustful words, whispered as they were.

He lets go and slips to the ground. “I understand.”

She turns to him. He looks like nothing so much as a kicked pup. He is over forty, but in the silver winter sunshine he looks much younger. He doesn’t understand anything.

She forces his face up with both of her hands and kisses him, her men be damned.

And that night, she forgets all about the seven once again.

18\. 

“Your hand is cold,” she whispers, taking it in hers. They are curled against each other under the furs, face to face, and a light is dancing in his eye.

“The whole North is cold,” he answers. “Though I know someplace warm.” He presses his hand to the flat area between her small breasts.

“That won’t do,” she whispers back. “You only have the one hand and you have to protect it. I won’t have you losing it to frostbite.” She takes his hand from her chest and slips it between her legs.

“You know, my fingers are especially vulnerable,” he answers, testing her entrance with one.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she says, and opens her legs to his ministrations, moving against him so that one finger is inside her.

He opens his mouth and she knows it’s going to be another jape about the cold, so she covers it with her own mouth before he can finish.

19.

Jaime must be fairly bored at Winterfell, because the next night after dinner, she enters their chamber (it stopped being hers, starting being theirs, that first night, though it wasn’t until the sennight that she called it that without fear) to see candles everywhere. The room is blissfully warm, the fire roaring, a decanter of wine and two cups at the ready.

“What the fuck is all of this?” Brienne hears herself saying. “Are you trying to burn down Winterfell?”

She regrets it the moment a flicker of pain crosses Jaime’s face.

“No, I’m sorry, that was unkind. But you needn’t romance me, ser.” _I already love you._ “I already asked you to put a child in me.”

He nods, looking no less hurt. _Tell him now,_ her heart screams at her. _Now. Now._ But she cannot. It has been over a fortnight of whatever this is, and he has not told her. After all, he loves his sister. And the longer she waits, the harder the confession is.

20.

Brienne awakes to flickering firelight to see Jaime leaning over, staring at her.

“What?” she asks.

He smiles. “I’m old,” he sighs, “and old people forget things. I want to make sure I remember how you look when you sleep.”

She can’t help the blush that rises to her cheeks. “You’re hardly old.”

“I’m hardly young,” he counters.

She tangles a finger in his lengthening hair. “You’re perfect.” It’s the closest she can get to telling him, she thinks.

21.

“You know,” he says, “you’re a knight now. You _could_ knight Podrick.”

She squints into the fire. They are both wrapped in furs and sitting by the heat, waiting for the sweat of their lovemaking to dry. “Do you think he’s ready?”

“He fought the dead and lived. Anyone who can say that is ready.”

“I know,” she sighs. “I didn’t because… if he was a knight…”

Jaime nodded. “He would have to ride South with the army.”

She looked to him, meeting his eyes.

“But you know, the army is too far away now for him to catch up.”

She nods. She’ll do it on the morrow.

22.

His head is pillowed on her stomach when he says, “You said you are never like to marry. Why is that?”

She said that ages ago, weeks ago, a lifetime in their little Winterfell world. “No man would have me for a wife.”

She thinks the conversation is over. The silence stretches out, and she begins to drift to sleep. He stirs and lays a kiss on her stomach. “I’d have you,” he says.

It’s almost a proposal, almost a declaration, but too far from either for her to pretend. She wipes away the tear that falls, determined he won’t see, because she knows he is lying.

23.

She has been training new recruits. House Glover sent an apology to Lady Sansa and a small force of its fighters to defend Winterfell. It was an empty gesture now, but not nothing. Brienne, the only commander left behind when the army rode South, conscripts Ser Podrick to help her drill them, so at least they would not be idle as they defended Winterfell from absolutely nothing and no one.

She is sore after the first day-- a reminder that she has been playing wife to Jaime Lannister more than she has been training, and she has grown soft. He tries to to pull her legs apart, to sling one over his shoulder so his mouth can touch her womanhood, but Brienne only groans at the sore muscles. “I’m sorry, Ser Jaime, not tonight.”

He gives her an odd look. “Roll over, Ser Brienne.”

“I said--”

“Calm down, I do know how to do other things besides fuck. I spent all day in the kitchens kneading bread, for instance, and I might as well put my new skills to use.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Roll over and you will.”

She complies, ever trusting, and he presses his hand into the flesh of her back. His fingers find her most tender spots, and soon his handless arm joins beside his fingers, moving her muscles. He finishes her back and moves down her legs, where the soreness causes her to tense and yelp. He moves to her neck and arms. Her scalp. Her feet. Her hands.

And suddenly she finds she wants him tonight after all. He rolls her again to get her arms, her chest, the front of her legs, and like water running downhill she opens her legs and he touches her there too.

24.

“You’re inhumanly soft,” he whispers against the skin of her inner thigh. They are laying in the afterglow, naked in the warmth of the room. Brienne goes through firewood like no one else in Winterfell, determined to keep her Southern soldier warm.

“I’ve been called inhuman many times in my life, but never for that.”

His hand is slowly stroking her thigh, but her words give him pause. He stops to look into her eyes.

“You are better than any of them deserve.”

She has a distant look in her eyes. She turns to him. “Am I better than you deserve, Ser Jaime?” She says the title when she is trying to harden her heart against his soft words. She doesn’t believe any of this will last.

“Infinitely,” he sighs into her lips and kisses her.

25.

“What is it you do all day?” she asks him.

“I told you, I’ve been in the kitchens.”

“Why the kitchens?”

“I’m least likely to run into Sansa Stark there.”

“She doesn’t begrudge you.”

“And I don’t need to give her reason to.”

Brienne thinks on it a moment and decides Jaime is right. He opens his mouth at all the wrong times, and no doubt he would give offence to the Lady of Winterfell if he spent too much time around her.

“Do you really knead bread?”

“Sometimes. I don’t mind it,” he says, sitting next to her on the bed.

“Jaime Lannister doesn’t mind kneading bread?”

“There’s something soothing to it, and the company is good.”

She feels a kernal of jealousy uncoil in her chest. She doesn’t feel jealousy for Cersei anymore than she could feel jealousy for the Sun. She cannot touch Cersei, cannot compare. But some kitchen lass…

“Oh, don’t,” he barks a laugh. “I mostly work with Gilly, Samwell Tarly's wife. Well, they’re not married, since he’s a member of the Night’s Watch, and they take a vow of celibacy, but he’s been in violation of it for years and just got a second child on her.” He pauses. “No, that’s not right, her father got the first child on her. She’s a wildling,” he says, as if that explains how her father is involved. “Unlike you, I’ve never spent much time with a wildling before.”

She casts him a glare she hopes is withering. He smiles.

“She’s not the only one with child. She says she knows of four others. Wartime and all. She’s also an accomplished midwife. Or was, North of the Wall.” The look he shoots her is full of hidden meaning. Brienne has to look away. She doesn’t like discussing the child they are trying to make. It feels a bit too close to tempting fate.

“And anyway,” Jaime continues effortlessly, “I fought with Tarly’s father and brother on the Rose Road. He wanted to hear about how valiant his brother was in that battle. Before _our queen_ killed him.”

She stares into the fire and tries to imagine how it is the Hound, and not Jaime Lannister, who is afraid of fire. “Were you there when he burned them?” she asks suddenly.

“Who?” his brows knit in confusion.

“The Mad King. When he burned the Starks. Rickard and Brandon.”

His face clouds over and she wishes she could take the question back.

“Yes,” is all he says.

26.

They take a ride in the wolfswood the next day after supper. It’s deeply cold, but there’s something in the air that smells wet and fertile, and she thinks she can imagine spring for the first time in a long time. When they return, they are too tired to do anything but sleep.

27.

He catches her smelling his tunic. She’s so embarrassed she flushes right to the top of her head. But he doesn’t tease. He watches her fondly.

“What?” she snaps.

“Brienne of Tarth,” he chuckles, shaking his head. “You have a tender maiden’s heart.”

She wants him to take it back. She hides that soft place inside of her from everyone. But then she thinks maybe he has always known this about her.

28.

She wakes in the night with a flash of red blood staining the sheets, and it feels as if someone has died. She slips from the bed without waking Jaime, wearing little more than a robe, and crosses the cold castle to the room over the library, where she knows Samwell Tarly and his lady live. She knocks thrice.

Sam opens the door, and Brienne quietly asks for Lady Gilly. Sam looks confused, but guides her inside. He gently wakes Gilly, who disentangles herself from her sleeping son and glances up at Brienne. At once, Gilly ushers her to a far corner of the one room apartment, and pulls out a chair.

Brienne hesitates. She doesn’t talk about these things-- these _woman_ things-- with anyone. She hasn’t since she left her septa behind, and good riddance. She remembers Catelyn Stark and wonders if this is how one acquires a woman’s courage. “I’m bleeding and my moon’s blood is a sennight late.”

Gilly watches her and nods. “That can mean many different things. Perhaps it’s just late.”

“It has…” she took a deep breath, “It has never started so suddenly before.”

“It doesn’t have to mean what you think it means,” Gilly assures her. “I had bleeding with little Sam when I was just a few weeks along. If it gets worse, you’ll know. If it gets better, you’ll know what that means too.”

When Brienne returns to their rooms, she finds Jaime awake. He has already changed out the linens on the bed. He is slumped in front of the fire. He looks haunted, and she feels much the same. He wraps his arm around her hips and holds her for a very long time, before they climb back in bed.

29.

She washes his hair, and he washes hers. Her bleeding stopped by the morning, but she doesn’t tell him, and he doesn’t touch her. She wonders what she has done wrong.

30.

He suggests riding again, but she feigns a poor stomach. She can’t say what started the bleeding and she can’t help wondering if it was riding or training. She can tell he doesn’t believe her, but he doesn’t press her.

31.

The next night is different. He is tender and talkative immediately after dinner. In their room, he pours her wine. He kisses her feverishly, whispering words she can almost hear into her skin. He pauses to look at her.

“Are you ready?” he asks, soft as a kitten.

She nods.

But he doesn’t take her immediately. He sits back and simply looks at her, and though she has been naked before him many times, perhaps never so naked as now.

“You are beautiful.” He says it carefully, deliberately, and she wants to believe him.

“Are you blushing, milady? You are! I can see it here.” He kisses her cheek. “And here.” Her neck. “Here.” Her breast. “Here.” Her thigh, then the back of her knee.

“But I know where you are hottest and pinkest.” He lifts her knee to expose her center. “Blush for me, milady.” He blows on her lower lips and she whimpers. “My blushing maid,” he whispers into her skin. “My shining knight. May I sheath my sword, ser?”

Her head drops backwards with a moan.

“I gave you a sword once. What did you call it?”

She groaned again.

“Tell me. Tell me the sword’s name.”

“Oathkeeper,” she exhales, breathless.

“There it is,” he smiles. “Tell me you want me to drive my sword into you. Talk to me, Brienne.”

“Your… please, Jaime.”

“My sword. Say it.”

“Your sword, ser.”

“Which sword, ser?”

“Oathkeeper,” she groans, and he enters her, sheathing his sword within her.

Neither lasts long this night.

32.

They sit before the fire, each in their own chair, their hands stretched between them, his left in her right.

Into the silence, Jaimes speaks. “I like the way your hand feels in mine. Were that I had two, I could double the pleasure.”

“When you had two, you were insufferable.”

He smiles fondly.

She squeezes his hand. “I like this one just fine. If you had two, you would have killed me by now.”

He turns toward her too quickly and there is no jape in his voice when he says, “I do not follow your meaning, my lady.”

She realizes he has misunderstood her. “You are entirely too clever with one hand in bed, ser. With two, you could drive me to madness.”

He laughs, a sound rich and deep and she laughs back. He reaches towards her and pulls her into this lap, and Brienne worries it’s too much for the chair, which creaks dangerously.

33.

She sits between his legs. Both are sated. Usually they sleep after, but this time his chin is on her shoulder. She has to slouch a little for him to get it there, and he is kissing the back of her neck. They can’t look at each other, because they are playing a game of truths.

“How much gold is left in Casterly Rock?” She asks.

“Little and less. What’s the most obscene thing you ever saw before I debauched you?”

“The soldiers and camp followers at Bitterbridge. Name one action you would undo.”

“Bran Stark. He says I had to push him. But he was a _child_. Seven help me…” Silence follows this, and she regrets asking.

Jaime pushes past it. “Did you ever play with dolls?”

“I did. Believe it or not, once upon a time I was a little girl just like any other.” Before the world had taught her that she couldn’t be. “Your favorite breakfast?”

He hums magically into her neck. “Have you ever been to Dorne?”

“It’s your turn!”

“I’m not--! I was taking my turn! In Dorne they have these big prickly fruits, but when you cut them open they’re pink and sweet. Rather like a knight I know. They are called Sunfruit, but I think I should rename them Maiden’s Heart.” He huffs against her neck. “They make oatmeal taste like dessert.”

“I don’t know how I feel being compared to a fruit.”

“They’re delicious. Feel flattered. What is your favorite thing about winter?”

She chuckles. “Jaime Lannister wearing naught but furs.”

His breath ghosts across her neck as he kisses her there. Words fight to free themselves from her tongue. From her soul. The worst he might do is laugh. She loves him so terribly it is a physical ache. She sucks in a breath and gathers her nerves to say so. “I love you, Jaime.”

In a flash, in an instant, he is on her. It is like the first time all over again. He is turning her to devour her mouth and pushing her down, and she is rising to meet him, digging her nails into his back. He is hard again so suddenly, and then inside of her. He keeps his eyes open and on her as he drives down to meet her. She drives up to parry. She would not lay still as her septa had told her. She loves this man.

He finishes and gaspes as if he had been underwater. She holds him. Soon, he is asleep.

But he had not said it back. That silence was deafening.

 _At least he didn’t laugh,_ she reminds herself.

34.

Their room is on the ground floor, where Brienne can quickly rush out in the case of an emergency. They have two windows, covered by shutters. She had hung furs over both to keep out the draught.

That night, after they lay together, Jaime crosses to the window and tears down the fur and throws open the shutters. He recoils from the icy wind, and she yelps to cover herself. “What on earth are you doing?”

He does not laugh or smile when he says, “I need to see you in the moonlight. I’ve only ever seen you in firelight. After moonlight, I want daylight. When we get South and my balls won’t freeze off in the daylight.”

She rises, still holding her furs, and beats him away from the window. She closes the shutters and reaches up with two hands, her furs falling to the floor, to reaffix the furs over the windows. She glares at him. “You can freeze your balls off in the moonlight just as easily.”

But in her heart she hears his words. _We_. _South_. She wants to know whether he means any of it, but she can’t ask. He might say he doesn’t. Worse, he might lie and say he does.

35.

There is a gale the next night, and they stay beneath the furs, even over their heads, to keep warm. For the first time, Brienne puts her mouth on his manhood. He jumps as though scalded, and she wonders whether Cersei has ever done this. Wouldn’t it be below such a beautiful lady? Brienne has seen camp followers do this many times. It is not below her. She is a knight, not a lady.

36.

She finds Jaime near the forges in the late afternoon. She sits to polish Oathkeeper (and now she can’t even think the name without turning red, damn Jaime Lannister to each of the seven hells in turn), while he helps their lowborn blacksmith Baratheon clean the weapons gathered from the dead after the battle. They’ve put it off far too long. The weapons are starting to smell. The dragonglass is to be buried in the crypts. They think the Night King gone for good. But Sansa preaches caution, and Brienne loves her for it.

He is watching her as they work silently, a mere forty feet apart. She can feel his eyes on her. _Is this daylight enough for you, Jaime?_ But she knows this is not what he meant. She turns redder.

“My lady,” he says, “you seem to be ill. Gendry, have you ever seen a lady turn so red?”

“No milord,” the Baratheon mumbles.

Jaime turns to him. “You’re lord of Storm’s End. Some would say I am lord of the Rock. That makes us equals.”

Gendry stops his work and looks up. “What makes us equals is we’re both out here in the fucking cold wiping something worse than shit from these weapons. My lord.”

Jaime smiles. He raises an eyebrow to Brienne, who has stopped to watch the interchange. She says nothing. Mayhaps Jaime likes Gendry. Mayhaps not. But she sees that they will never talk to each other about Robert. _The past is really in the past._ She lets herself believe it for a moment.

37.

He has five very fine fingers and he knows how to use them.

38.

“Samwell Tarly is putting Brandon Stark’s stories down on parchment,” he says.

She knows he spends some days with them in the library. It amuses her, because she knows he was never like his brother when it came to books. “Are you their scribe now?” she asks.

His eyes crinkle in laughter. “Sansa Stark won’t let me within ten feet of a quill.”

Brienne stops. She had not known this. “She lets you keep a sword.”

“She knows a quill is the more dangerous weapon.”

“I can talk to her--”

He waves it off. “I’ve no one to write to and no hand to write with. I may be passable with swordplay, but I’ve practiced. Less so writing.”

She thinks of it sometimes, his other hand. She wonders if he does. How does he remember it? Does he yearn for it? Can he still smell its rotting stench as she can when she closes her eyes? It all feels a lifetime ago, and almost as though it happened to different people. A naive summer soldier and the Queen’s golden lion. A world where sapphires and gold held meaning. At Winterfell, trust is the only currency left. It bothers her that Sansa Stark still does not trust him.

39.

“Hold my hand?” he asks. She opens hers.

He drops the golden hand into her palm.

“You are really the worst,” she says, unable to contain a laugh.

But she doesn’t give it back. They are sitting next to each other again in front of the fire, a nightly ritual, and she tucks the hand into her own. Once, she had thought of it as Cersei’s hand, some sign connecting him to his sister. But she’s grown used to seeing it, used to feeling it on her when they part in the morning or hide behind the stables for a kiss. She holds it in her lap, running her fingers over the filigree.

When she looks up, she sees Jaime has seen her. He is smiling so fondly that she can’t be embarrassed.

40.

It is the middle of the night when she is awakened by Jaime’s growing need pressing into her backside. Wordlessly, she spreads her legs, and he slips inside of her from this new angle. They move in silence until he spends himself in her. He kisses her neck. And then he is once again asleep.

41.

It is the middle of the night when she is awakened by Jaime’s absence. She thinks of the scroll from earlier, and panic rises in her. She hears a horse knicker, and she pulls on a robe. He is outside, adjusting his stirrups. Her heart leaps into her throat. She had known. She had _known_. She told herself as a child, as a young woman, no man will ever love you. No one. It has been a dream for a time, a dream like spring, but this is winter.

She knows what heartbreak is. It broke her heart to watch Renly die. This is not heartbreak. Jaime has taken her heart. She lowered her defenses, and he stole away with the treasure. Her tender maiden’s heart, he had called it. Now she had none.

Only later, when she is curled in on herself in bed, does she wonder that she hadn’t told him the one thing that might have made him stay. But she knows why she didn’t. It would be hollow if he stayed for the babe. That is Cersei’s game. She has only asked that he give her one, not that he stay to raise it. He had never made any promise to her. She had fooled herself. At least if she must return home a broken woman, she can return with an heir in her.

1.

Lady Sansa’s eyes hold pity. “The horsemaster told me,” her wise lady whispers.

“I’m fine,” Brienne lies.

“Who are you going to say is the father?” Why does Lady Sansa have to be quite _so_ wise.

“Jaime Lannister. He might not have loved me, but I won’t lie about his child. I am not Cersei.” She wants to strangle the part of her that feels shame, that feels self-pity. She has done this to herself. All her life she’s known herself unloveable. She chose to believe an unspoken lie, and her punishment is fitting.

Sansa’s face collapses slightly, softening. “Did he say why he left?”

“He said he is not a good man, and that my faith in him has been misplaced.”

“He does love you,” Sansa says. “Anyone with two eyes can see it.”

“He is a skilled liar. He loves his sister. He has returned to help her win her war.”

Sansa stares out at the battlements for a long time, and then nods to herself. “Do you wonder at his timing? When Daenerys was like to win the war, he stayed. Does that sound like a man who has left to help her win?”

“Perhaps he is a coward who feared for his life--”

“Brienne,” Sansa interrupts, looking exasperated. “He walked into Winterfell and gave himself to our judgements with no justification for his actions against the Starks. He endured the jeers and jests of the northern soldiers, and still commanded them through the long night. I will not pretend to like Jaime Lannister. He is like other men-- he confuses nobility and stupidity far too often. You could do better. But he is not a coward. He went to kill his sister. Mayhaps to end the war, mayhaps to ensure he could live a long life, but I’ve no doubt he did it for you.”

Brienne feels like she is going to be sick. And then she is sick onto the ground.

Sansa, impossibly, laughs. “If I had a dragonglass spear for every woman losing her breakfast around Winterfell, we wouldn’t have needed to mine Dragonstone. You’re the fifth today. Soon we will wish for the smell of the wights again.”

“My lady,” Brienne stutters. “I-- I didn’t. I never thought--”

Sansa smiles. “Ser Brienne, I think these Glover knights are getting a bit too restless with all this peace. They need to do their part. I charge you to take them South and rejoin them to the rest of the Northern Troops. After this, I release you from my service.”

Brienne staggers backwards. “My lady--”

“Go and be happy, Brienne. Someone needs to be, or what has all this fighting been for?”


End file.
